Real Israel: Sabra-style chores

There’s an art to washing the floor, folding laundry
and making an Israeli salad.

Cleaning 521.
(photo credit:Marc Israel Sellem/ The Jerusalem Post)

Iam definitely Israeli, but I will never be a Sabra. It’s not just that a Sabra
is by definition someone born in Israel; I lack at least three essential skills
of Sabraness.

A casual conversation recently reinforced the first
required talent with which I am not innately blessed. By chance, I met someone
who turned out to be married to the former kibbutznikit who taught me how to do
sponja, that utterly Israeli way of washing the floor.

“Give her my
regards,” I said in parting, “although I doubt she’ll remember
me.”

“Believe me, if she had to teach you how to do sponja, she won’t
have forgotten you,” came the reply, which instantly reminded me how I felt more
than 30 years ago.

When I arrived in the late 1970s, going from the
British capital to a religious kibbutz in the Negev – so traditional the
children still slept in children’s houses and not in their parents’ homes – I
wasn’t the only one to experience culture shock, it seems. It was
mutual.

The kibbutznikim could not understand how somebody could reach
the age of 18 without knowing how to clean the floor in the proper way. This
involves sweeping with what looks like a witch’s broom before sloshing down
water with little regard for the level of the Kinneret, then swooshing the water
out of the room/building using a special implement called a magav – a stick with
a rubber squeegee appliance at the end. Finally there came the trickiest part of
the whole operation: wiping the remaining water with a floor rag (known as a
smartut) that was somehow tied to the bottom of the magav. If you’re
Israeli-born, you’ll know how to do it without becoming untied.

Me? I
always tied myself up in knots but still failed to produce a polished
act.

I think the kibbutz members were more than a little concerned that
somebody just about to undergo weapons training in the IDF had such difficulty
handling a magav. My kibbutz peers were astounded that I had got this far in
life without ever having swooshed, sloshed and washed a stone floor. In vain I
tried to explain that I had not had servants (the image of all British, courtesy
of the hit TV series Upstairs, Downstairs). My home in London, however, had had
wall-to-wall carpeting, which lent itself to vacuum cleaning. My Sabra
counterparts had barely heard of a Hoover, and the idea of having carpets
wall-to-wall, in those days, was literally a joke: a one-off line in a
then-popular comedy sketch in which the newlywed bride states her desire for
“wall-towall children.”

Not surprisingly, when I recently read Meir
Shalev’s My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner, I was
immediately sucked into his descriptions of this pioneer matriarch fighting the
Jezreel Valley dust on Moshav Nahalal (without the use of the bourgeois
“svieeperrr,” or “sweeper,” which lay untouched behind the locked doors of a
bathroom nobody was ever allowed to enter).

Doing sponja used to wipe me
out. Salvation came from an unlikely source. Years after my aliya, a
European-born landlady made the lease on her apartment conditional on my never
washing the floors Israeli-style, which she feared would destroy the wooden legs
of the antique furniture that had somehow traveled across war-torn Europe to the
Promised Land. Instead I was asked to only ever use a bucket and
mop.

This worked well for me – until it became clear that the mop was
going bald. One Friday I could not ignore it any longer. The head would need
replacing. I went to a local hardware store and found myself at an
uncharacteristic loss for words. I could think in Hebrew, dream in Hebrew, pun,
joke, sing and curse in Hebrew (okay, I sometimes swear in Arabic, but that’s a
very Israeli thing to do, too). The one noun I needed, however, escaped me just
as surely as the rag had always slipped off the magav at the critical
moment.

I tried to explain what I wanted in various creative ways, which
included, as I recall with some embarrassment, graphically depicting the
snake-laden head of the mythological Medusa.

It was at this point that
the salesman suddenly looked at me with surprise and asked: “At mitkavenet
le’mop? [Do you mean a ‘mop’?]” Well, of course I meant a “mop” – and looking
back, it figures that there was no Hebrew word for the implement still derided
by Sabras determined to make a clean sweep in their own inimitable style. For my
part, instead of coming clean and confessing that I was sponja- challenged and
needed something more foreign to clean my floors, I noted that my landlady
preferred it.

The Hebrew acronym “MOP,” by the way, stands for R&D
(mehkar upituah), so I like to think that my housecleaning habits have always
been ahead of their times.

HERE IS a good point to confess another dirty
secret – my closets are a disaster zone. All my Sabra friends seem to have the
knack of folding laundry as if their lives depended on it – you can imagine each
of them packing a parachute with the same skill and attention. They remove
shirts, skirts and trousers from the line, and in one swift movement – which
always seems to me a sleight of hand – they neatly fold the clothes into smart
square shapes ready to be stacked away. It’s so natural to them that they don’t
mind folding as we talk. Me? I can’t even neatly fold a dry
floorcloth.

This makes my heart skip a beat at airport security. “Did you
pack your suitcase yourself?” goes the standard question every Israeli knows to
answer before it’s been asked. I’m always afraid a young Sabra security guard
will ask me to open my bag and won’t believe me.

No matter how hard I
try, my clothes do not look like they’ve been packed by someone who is part of
the fold.

The third non-Sabra giveaway sign is my inability to make an
Israeli salad, the famous salat Yisraeli which acts as an accompaniment for
every meal from breakfast to supper. I can, of course, buy the correct
ingredients. Even with the price of cucumbers rising to levels that could
inspire another social protest à la last year’s Cottage Cheese Revolution, it’s
rare to find my fridge entirely bereft of a few tomatoes and cukes. It’s when I
get to the dicey business of chopping the vegetables that I come unstuck. Try as
I might, I cannot create those tiny colorful cubes that are an essential part of
an Israeli salad. I have used various knives, different techniques and several
chopping boards, but I still cut a poor figure of an imitation
Sabra.

“Just relax, let your mind go blank and act on instinct,”
suggested a well-meaning Sabra friend one day. So I did. The result was not a
perfectly diced tomato but a red, bleeding finger.

Not a small, neat cut
either. I managed to make a mess even out of cutting my own digit.

As
cool as the proverbial cucumber that seemed to be laughing at me from the
countertop, I rinsed my finger under the tap, wrapped it in a gauze dressing,
and painfully pointed out that I did things differently.

I don’t think my
friend understood just how differently until she tried to locate a smartut to
wipe the bloodstains from the floor, and I shook my head and pointed my bandaged
finger at the mop.

To this day I wonder if I shouldn’t have exercised my
acquired Israeli chutzpah and – using my injury as an excuse – asked her if she
could, just this once, fold the laundry for me.

liat@jpost.com

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